Mexico

A ″migrant caravan″, which has since 12 October been making its way from Honduras to the USA, has swelled to around 7,000 people as it starts to make its way through Mexico. The caravan is usually a yearly event, although there have been two this year. Known as Viacrucis del Migrante (“Migrant’s Way of the Cross”) the caravan has previously been organised or supported by Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People without Borders) but this one has not been directly organised by them and has had a more organic formation. At the start, migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, who are fleeing...

US President Donald Trump has hailed a “really good” trade deal with neighbour Mexico — it could be a precursor to a comprehensive relaunch of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which Trump had previously criticised. Negotiations with the other Nafta partner, Canada, are ongoing. Canada has clashed with the USA in recent months over tariffs on dairy, aluminium, and steel. Trump has threatened to impose further tariffs on trade with Canada, opening the prospect for a US-Mexico-only deal that definitively excludes them. The Mexican government insists it wants the agreement to...

Left populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the Mexican presidential election on 1 July, but his victory offers little for the beleaguered Mexican working class. López Obrador, often known after his initials as AMLO, won over half (53%) of the vote, defeating Ricardo Anaya of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Jose Antonio Meade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Although López Obrador led in the polls for months, his victory was surprisingly comfortable considering the history of fraudulent elections in Mexico. López Obrador belonged to the ruling...

“Anyone who thinks [Donald Trump] has dropped his vow to rip up the global trading system has not been paying attention”, wrote Edward Luce in the Financial Times (18 October), after the fourth round of US-Mexican-Canadian talks on Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement, closed on 17 October. The Mexican and Canadian governments were aghast at the US negotiators’ manner, and their push for arbitrary changes which would destabilise the agreement which dates back to 1994. There will now be a lull: a fifth round of talks on 17-21 November, and then another in early 2018. Peter Navarro,...

At a precipitous time in the history of Mexico, is the left finally getting its act together and forming a viable alternative? Certainly Mexico is a state in crisis. Economically, it is suffering from the first wave of shocks as the oil price has slumped over the last six months. With oil a vital source of government revenue, both borrowing and debt are up and social welfare programmes under more pressure. The economic malaise is much deeper. For three decades Mexico has been in the vanguard of neoliberal policy in Latin America. Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican state has...

On 26 September, students at the Mexican Normal de Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero were planning to go to Mexico City to join a protest. The students peacefully took over three buses, common for protests in Mexico, and were asking fellow passengers for money to fund their trip when they were ambushed by the police who started shooting indiscriminately. Attacks from police and gunmen in civilian clothing left six dead including one student who was skinned and was left with no eyes. Five were gravely wounded (one is now brain dead) and 43 became “disappeared” comrades,...

The Struggle Begins THE murder of Leon Trotsky culminated an epoch. It marked the end of the epoch of Old Bolsheviks, for Leon Trotsky was the lone survivor of that grand school of revolutionary Marxists. His murder at the same time was the final personal victory of Cain Stalin, and, if any more evidence was required, of the irrevocable counter-revolutionary degeneration of his bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and therewith the Communist International. The struggle in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between the Russian Left Opposition and the Stalin regime was accompanied by the...

There’s not a clean, pleasant capitalism in one place –— glitzy, high-tech, full of good food and happy people — and a separable, unfortunate area of poverty, unemployment and misery. The whole system contains both. Capitalism’s scientists create fantastic drugs that are then denied to people who haven’t enough money to pay for them; amazing electronic gadgets are made by people paid pennies; shiny new products are produced, as rivers and skies are polluted and the planet heads for meltdown. Jammed up against the 3,200km US-Mexican border, on the Mexican side, is an area which appears to...

There’s not a clean, pleasant capitalism in one place – glitzy, high-tech, full of good food and happy people – and a separable, unfortunate area of poverty, unemployment and misery. The whole system contains both. Capitalism’s scientists create fantastic drugs that are then denied to people who haven’t enough money to pay for them; amazing electronic gadgets are made by people paid pennies; shiny new products are produced as rivers and skies are polluted and the planet heads for meltdown. Jammed up against the US-Mexican 3200km border, on the Mexican side, is an area which appears to...